find it in
me to scold you for your many follies. Young woman, I don't approve
of you, but you are the sweetest creature that ever walked this
earth. Thanks be where thanks are due that I am a woman; you would
have been my bane had I been born a man!

But, to be serious, I have been thinking things out; you must leave
your mother, Constance, and come to me. You have lived this kind of
life long enough; and--believe me, my dearest--you are not strong
enough to bear it longer unharmed.

Shall I be a little cruel to you? Well, my own, I think that if you
looked into your heart, searchingly and truly, as you always declare
you know not how, you would find that it is more cowardice than duty
binds you to Mrs. Rayner. She bore you, you say, she brought you
up--Good Lord! and how! If you were not a pearl among women, what
would you be by this time? No, you know as well as I do that it is
cowardice, not duty, prevents you from taking this step.

I shall never forget what you said to me once, when first I knew
you; it was in Florence, and we were leaning out of window in my
room. I remember it the better because it was during this
conversation that I ventured to put my arm round your waist for the
first time.

"Now I call this pleasant!" you said. "Here am I looking out of
window with a nice girl's arm round my waist, and right away from my
mother. She doesn't even know where I am!"

I loved my mother so much that this shocked me extremely, and I told
you so. You flushed, I remember, and cried:--

"Oh, but you don't know what my life is! You don't know what it is
to long with all your might to get away from somebody, somebody who
has hung over you ever since you were born, so that she seemed to
stand between you and the very air you breathed." And then you told
me about your marriage; how, in order to be free from her, you took
the husband, rich and infamous, into whose arms she threw you in
your innocence; how, at the end of a few months, you returned home
doubly a slave, to be crushed, year in, year out, by love that
showed itself almost as hate; bound now in such a way that if any
other love were offered you, you could not take it.

And how old are you now? Twenty-four. Still her puppet, her doll,
for that is what you are; she dresses and undresses you from morning
till night, then struts up and down the streets of Europe, showing
her pretty plaything. You say she has no thought but you, loves you
so much that it w